Principal autonomy has been identified as an important ingredient in effective and healthy schools. However, little is known about the various dimensions of the phenomenon and how it takes form in different contexts. This article presents an analytical device contributing to further understand the complex nature of principal autonomy. The device…

Purpose: Information and communication technologies (ICT) has an increasing impact on schools. School leaders play a key role in this context as drivers of innovation including those related to ICT. Against this background, the study presented in this article focuses on school leadership and management activities with ICT and related challenges.…

The quantity and quality of talented individuals in STEM (science/S, technology/T, engineering/E and mathematics/M) fields contribute to a nation's overall competitiveness. Taiwan and many countries around the world are vigorously promoting the training of STEM professionals and the enhancement of STEM literacy for all as one of the key education…

The aim of this report is threefold. Its first section provides an overall sketch of the situation across Europe and the underlying mechanisms for the differences in European countries. The second section focuses on the heterogeneities within each country. It examines the disparities among students in order to understand which of those correlate…

Mainstream scholarly approaches to improving equity in education, including culturally responsive education, promote multicultural recognition of diversity and abandon color-blindness as an ineffective strategy. The social psychological literature affords a more nuanced understanding of the merits of different diversity ideologies. However, these…

In this article, we consider the benefits and challenges of enacting creativity in the K-12 context and examine educational policy with regard to twenty-first century learning and technology. Creativity is widely considered to be a key construct for twenty-first century education. In this article, we review the literature on creativity relevant to…

Cross-national attraction is the first stage in international policy borrowing and analysis of its indicators provides insight into shifts in educational policies. We analyse cross-national attraction within the media discourse on the OECD's PISA in four countries: Australia, Finland, Japan and South Korea. Using the largest circulation English…

Employing Jurgen Habermas's notions of communicative and strategic action (1984), this paper draws on case studies of principals' decision making practices in three sites of Finland, Australia and Jamaica. The research examined principals' understandings of educational autonomy as a part of their practices of decision making. The paper argues that…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the different support systems used by teachers in compulsory education. Class and subject teachers and special educators from Finland (N = 57) and Sweden (N = 57) participated in the study, in which both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Participants completed an electronic questionnaire…

Definitions of teaching quality differ across jurisdictions and have evolved over time. Drawing on a study of five high-achieving countries with strong supports for teachers' professional learning and practice, this article describes the perspectives on good teaching rooted in standards for entry, preparation, and practice. These nations…

Globally, there is considerable investment in education technologies leading to increased attention from stakeholders (Trucano, 2017). For a deeper understanding about the implementation of various technologies, research is needed to examine how teachers are incorporating them in teaching and learning. This study focused on eight countries to…

This study focuses on the politics of time in education by analysing 'The Future School' reports published by Nordic state authorities between 2010 and 2015. Building on a system-theoretical understanding of social time, steering and second-order observations, we investigate how temporal political communication frames the future of Nordic basic…

Ongoing global issues relating to the decline of the popularity of institutional religions, the rise of numbers of non-religious persons, and new models of spirituality in superdiverse societies have resulted in the need to reconceptualise religious diversity as worldviews diversity, and to critically examine increasing calls for the provision of…

This open access book presents an in-depth analysis of data from ICCS. An international group of scholars critically address the state of civic and citizenship education in the four Nordic countries that participated in the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) in 2009 and 2016. The findings are of particular relevance to…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…